Why HR Heads rarely become CEOs

What is the issue?

Name one CEO who made his career in HR. Most people cant name any - Recently I had posted this question to the LinkedIn HR group - and I got two responses and both had spent some time in HR - but didnt make their career in HR. Most CEOs tend to have risen up either through a finance, marketing, operations or sometimes a legal function. Some may have come from strategic planning, but that typically has been only a step in a variety of roles. However, rarely has a CEO come from the HR function.
Even though top Human Resources professionals become the stewards of the most important assets of the organization and have a unique insight into the role a CEO must play, they rarely ever rise to the top position in an organization. Why is that? Is it because HR professionals by nature don’t want to become CEOs? Or is it because they never see themselves as becoming CEOs and always view themselves as supporting the business from the outside but never truly from inside? Or is it because they don’t have the skill sets to become the CEO? Or is it something else?

The answer may lie in all of the above. Many top HR professionals never want to become CEOs. They prefer the “quiet” comfort of never having to deal with finance or market issues, and are quiet content dealing with what they often refer to quiet naively as “people” issues. Underlying some of this thinking is a belief that they can never rise to the top position and always view themselves as business partners but not being in the business itself. In their mind there exists a mental model about their own role as being advisors on leadership, compensation and staffing issues, but not as somebody who can facilitate strategic choices about a business.

This leads, over a longer period, to the poor development of some core skills required to become an effective CEO – having a strategic acumen, being analytical, developing a general manager’s view of the business, understanding market, customer and operational trends. And often, many top HR professionals struggle with financial analysis and numerical sufficiency. HR professionals end up becoming narrow functional experts as opposed to becoming functional experts with strong general management acumen, like top finance people do. All of these make it difficult for top HR professionals to be seen as viable candidates for a CEO role or any general management role.

In my next post I will elaborate on the "doom cycle" for HR professionals.

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